Three years ago, Shaun Winterton was looking at photos of bugs on Flickr. Winterton is an expert on a type of insect called lacewings—beautiful, strange creatures with long, translucent (and, yes, lace-like) wings. There are more than 13,000 photos on Flickr with "lacewing" in the description, but one in particular caught Winterton’s attention. It was a photo from Malaysia, taken by a man named Guek Hock Ping, and it captured an animal with unusual blue spots on its wings.

Winterton contacted Guek, and asked whether he could go and take more photos of the bug—but it wasn’t until a year later that Guek was able to find another specimen. When he did, however, Winterton realized that he was looking at a previously undiscovered species of insect. A year later, Winterton and Guek published a paper together, describing Semachrysa jade.

Their finding points to a new kind of naturalism—one aided by the computers so many of us carry with us as we live our lives. With millions of cameras and smartphones all over the planet pointed at the natural world, the chances that somebody might catch a new species or an unknown behavior have skyrocketed. And scientists are increasingly trying to tap into that vast pool of information. Wading into the billions of photos and videos shared on social media isn’t easy—but if researchers can harness our cameras, they may be able to unlock a huge amount of information about our world.

Take that video of ants making a daisy chain to pull a millipede that, last week, had scientists scratching their heads. The footage showed a behavior that entomologists hadn’t seen before. And it was shot by an amateur somewhere in Southeast Asia.

But, then, it's not just new species or behaviors that smartphones are documenting. Sometimes a photograph with a geotagged location might be the only record of a species in that location. "I’ve come across blog posts that are making new geographic records, I’ve had tweets that are the first and currently only published records of some species," says Morgan Jackson, an entomologist at the University of Guelph.

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These are the kinds of things that citizen science advocates dream of: collaborations between amateurs and trained scientists that produce real, published results. But citizen science projects are really hard to design—they have to be fun, interesting, and not too difficult for participants, while also being robust and scientifically useful. Winterton’s discovery of a new lacewing species is almost a serendipitous citizen science project—one that emerged not by design, but because a human had trawled Flickr and noticed something odd.

But how do you replicate that? There are more than eight million photos on Flickr tagged with the word "insect." Even if you try to drill down to things like "butterfly," "spider," or "beetle," you’re left with a crushing wall of photos, most of which aren’t going to be useful. That’s just Flickr. There is almost certainly a ton of useful data squirreled away in tweets and Facebook albums and YouTube videos all over the place. It’s finding it that’s the problem.

"You know how hard it is to find a certain Tweet—so trying to find one you don’t know exists is nearly impossible," Jackson says.

Here’s an example. This weekend, a strange-looking spider perched itself on the bow of my kayak. When we stopped on the side of the river for a snack, I snapped a photo of my spindly masthead and sent it off to Twitter, asking: "Bug people, what is this thing?" Within a few minutes I was informed that it was a Tetragnathid, also known as a "long-jawed spider." If you search Instagram, there is even a tag for "tetragnathidae," with 28 photos in it.

"Some of those aren’t tetragnathids, but that’s okay," Jackson says. He’s just happy people are tagging bugs more specifically than I did by saying "what is this thing."

Rose Eveleth/Instagram

Jackson thinks that if scientists can teach people just a little bit more about bugs—or any animal or plant, really—users could help filter some of the pictures they are taking. In his ideal world, I would know enough about spiders to be able to identify the "thing" on my kayak to the family level—tetragnathidae, in this case—and tag it for scientists to find.

It’s not just users that have some learning to do to make their photos helpful, though. Scientists also have to think to look to social media for information. "Not many taxonomists that I know would think to look through Facebook or Twitter hashtags," Jackson says, "even though they wouldn’t think twice to fly halfway across the world to sit in a foreign museum for a week to do essentially the exact same thing."

If you took that photo in your back yard anybody who reads that paper knows where you live now.

Using data scraped from users also raises interesting ethical questions. "You took that photo with your cell phone, so it has GPS embedded into the meta information," Jackson says. "I know the time, date, and who took it and where. There’s no reason I can’t use that in an information map. But I don’t know whether that’s unethical to do without that person’s permission."

Nicholas Evans, who works on research ethics and information technology at the University of Pennsylvania, says that these are questions the field will have to grapple with if scientists want to start using this kind of data in published papers. "Say we’re trawling through Twitter looking to make a map," Evans says—"then we can expect that data will be reasonably anonymized. We’ll just use the location information and nothing else. But if we’re using really small amounts of data, we’re talking about revealing where people live, depending on where they found it, and that’s different. We’ve learned that it’s a really bad idea to broadcast where you live on the Internet."

If you took that photo in your backyard, in other words, anybody who reads that paper knows where your backyard is.

There’s also the issue of crediting amateurs who may have been instrumental in a scientific discovery. In the lacewing case, Winterton and Guek were coauthors on the paper. In other cases, a scientist might name the new species after whoever snapped the photo. I asked Jackson if we’re about to enter an era of species with names like "frogsplaysoccer145" or "h0ckeymom."

"If all I’ve got is a username, and I can’t get in touch with them, personally I would consider it," he says. "It would get me some side-eye, but I wouldn’t have a problem if that’s the proper credit to put there."

And storing all this data will be crucial, too, another place where privacy and science might butt heads. If someone deletes his or her Instagram or Twitter account, and makes the conscious choice to remove that information from the web, can researchers still hang on to an archived copy?

The solution might be as simple as contacting the photographer and working out what she's comfortable with, like Winterton did with Guek. But in cases where you’re trying to use thousands of images, that can get unwieldy. And in the case of the ants, where the original footage has been reposted by someone else, finding the person who first captured an image or shot a video can be difficult.

As with almost everything, the field will likely struggle to keep up with technology. "Taxonomists work on the order of decades to almost centuries in some cases," Jackson says. "So to have things like this where you could have a new data set every day to be testing your ideas and hypotheses with—it’s outside the scope of what we’re used to working with."

If they can figure it out, though, researchers could be on the verge of tapping into an incredibly valuable resource. There are more than 500 million photos uploaded and shared every day. Some of those photos are bound to depict things nobody has ever seen before. It's just a matter of finding them.

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Should you drink more coffee? Should you take melatonin? Can you train yourself to need less sleep? A physician’s guide to sleep in a stressful age.

During residency, Iworked hospital shifts that could last 36 hours, without sleep, often without breaks of more than a few minutes. Even writing this now, it sounds to me like I’m bragging or laying claim to some fortitude of character. I can’t think of another type of self-injury that might be similarly lauded, except maybe binge drinking. Technically the shifts were 30 hours, the mandatory limit imposed by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, but we stayed longer because people kept getting sick. Being a doctor is supposed to be about putting other people’s needs before your own. Our job was to power through.

The shifts usually felt shorter than they were, because they were so hectic. There was always a new patient in the emergency room who needed to be admitted, or a staff member on the eighth floor (which was full of late-stage terminally ill people) who needed me to fill out a death certificate. Sleep deprivation manifested as bouts of anger and despair mixed in with some euphoria, along with other sensations I’ve not had before or since. I remember once sitting with the family of a patient in critical condition, discussing an advance directive—the terms defining what the patient would want done were his heart to stop, which seemed likely to happen at any minute. Would he want to have chest compressions, electrical shocks, a breathing tube? In the middle of this, I had to look straight down at the chart in my lap, because I was laughing. This was the least funny scenario possible. I was experiencing a physical reaction unrelated to anything I knew to be happening in my mind. There is a type of seizure, called a gelastic seizure, during which the seizing person appears to be laughing—but I don’t think that was it. I think it was plain old delirium. It was mortifying, though no one seemed to notice.

Why the ingrained expectation that women should desire to become parents is unhealthy

In 2008, Nebraska decriminalized child abandonment. The move was part of a "safe haven" law designed to address increased rates of infanticide in the state. Like other safe-haven laws, parents in Nebraska who felt unprepared to care for their babies could drop them off in a designated location without fear of arrest and prosecution. But legislators made a major logistical error: They failed to implement an age limitation for dropped-off children.

Within just weeks of the law passing, parents started dropping off their kids. But here's the rub: None of them were infants. A couple of months in, 36 children had been left in state hospitals and police stations. Twenty-two of the children were over 13 years old. A 51-year-old grandmother dropped off a 12-year-old boy. One father dropped off his entire family -- nine children from ages one to 17. Others drove from neighboring states to drop off their children once they heard that they could abandon them without repercussion.

His paranoid style paved the road for Trumpism. Now he fears what’s been unleashed.

Glenn Beck looks like the dad in a Disney movie. He’s earnest, geeky, pink, and slightly bulbous. His idea of salty language is bullcrap.

The atmosphere at Beck’s Mercury Studios, outside Dallas, is similarly soothing, provided you ignore the references to genocide and civilizational collapse. In October, when most commentators considered a Donald Trump presidency a remote possibility, I followed audience members onto the set of The Glenn Beck Program, which airs on Beck’s website, theblaze.com. On the way, we passed through a life-size replica of the Oval Office as it might look if inhabited by a President Beck, complete with a portrait of Ronald Reagan and a large Norman Rockwell print of a Boy Scout.

Since the end of World War II, the most crucial underpinning of freedom in the world has been the vigor of the advanced liberal democracies and the alliances that bound them together. Through the Cold War, the key multilateral anchors were NATO, the expanding European Union, and the U.S.-Japan security alliance. With the end of the Cold War and the expansion of NATO and the EU to virtually all of Central and Eastern Europe, liberal democracy seemed ascendant and secure as never before in history.

Under the shrewd and relentless assault of a resurgent Russian authoritarian state, all of this has come under strain with a speed and scope that few in the West have fully comprehended, and that puts the future of liberal democracy in the world squarely where Vladimir Putin wants it: in doubt and on the defensive.

The same part of the brain that allows us to step into the shoes of others also helps us restrain ourselves.

You’ve likely seen the video before: a stream of kids, confronted with a single, alluring marshmallow. If they can resist eating it for 15 minutes, they’ll get two. Some do. Others cave almost immediately.

This “Marshmallow Test,” first conducted in the 1960s, perfectly illustrates the ongoing war between impulsivity and self-control. The kids have to tamp down their immediate desires and focus on long-term goals—an ability that correlates with their later health, wealth, and academic success, and that is supposedly controlled by the front part of the brain. But a new study by Alexander Soutschek at the University of Zurich suggests that self-control is also influenced by another brain region—and one that casts this ability in a different light.

Modern slot machines develop an unbreakable hold on many players—some of whom wind up losing their jobs, their families, and even, as in the case of Scott Stevens, their lives.

On the morning of Monday, August 13, 2012, Scott Stevens loaded a brown hunting bag into his Jeep Grand Cherokee, then went to the master bedroom, where he hugged Stacy, his wife of 23 years. “I love you,” he told her.

Stacy thought that her husband was off to a job interview followed by an appointment with his therapist. Instead, he drove the 22 miles from their home in Steubenville, Ohio, to the Mountaineer Casino, just outside New Cumberland, West Virginia. He used the casino ATM to check his bank-account balance: $13,400. He walked across the casino floor to his favorite slot machine in the high-limit area: Triple Stars, a three-reel game that cost $10 a spin. Maybe this time it would pay out enough to save him.

“Well, you’re just special. You’re American,” remarked my colleague, smirking from across the coffee table. My other Finnish coworkers, from the school in Helsinki where I teach, nodded in agreement. They had just finished critiquing one of my habits, and they could see that I was on the defensive.

I threw my hands up and snapped, “You’re accusing me of being too friendly? Is that really such a bad thing?”

“Well, when I greet a colleague, I keep track,” she retorted, “so I don’t greet them again during the day!” Another chimed in, “That’s the same for me, too!”

Unbelievable, I thought. According to them, I’m too generous with my hellos.

When I told them I would do my best to greet them just once every day, they told me not to change my ways. They said they understood me. But the thing is, now that I’ve viewed myself from their perspective, I’m not sure I want to remain the same. Change isn’t a bad thing. And since moving to Finland two years ago, I’ve kicked a few bad American habits.

A professor of cognitive science argues that the world is nothing like the one we experience through our senses.

As we go about our daily lives, we tend to assume that our perceptions—sights, sounds, textures, tastes—are an accurate portrayal of the real world. Sure, when we stop and think about it—or when we find ourselves fooled by a perceptual illusion—we realize with a jolt that what we perceive is never the world directly, but rather our brain’s best guess at what that world is like, a kind of internal simulation of an external reality. Still, we bank on the fact that our simulation is a reasonably decent one. If it wasn’t, wouldn’t evolution have weeded us out by now? The true reality might be forever beyond our reach, but surely our senses give us at least an inkling of what it’s really like.

A report will be shared with lawmakers before Trump’s inauguration, a top advisor said Friday.

Updated at 2:20 p.m.

President Obama asked intelligence officials to perform a “full review” of election-related hacking this week, and plans will share a report of its findings with lawmakers before he leaves office on January 20, 2017.

Deputy White House Press Secretary Eric Schultz said Friday that the investigation will reach all the way back to 2008, and will examine patterns of “malicious cyber-activity timed to election cycles.” He emphasized that the White House is not questioning the results of the November election.

Asked whether a sweeping investigation could be completed in the time left in Obama’s final term—just six weeks—Schultz replied that intelligence agencies will work quickly, because the preparing the report is “a major priority for the president of the United States.”

Democrats who have struggled for years to sell the public on the Affordable Care Act are now confronting a far more urgent task: mobilizing a political coalition to save it.

Even as the party reels from last month’s election defeat, members of Congress, operatives, and liberal allies have turned to plotting a campaign against repealing the law that, they hope, will rival the Tea Party uprising of 2009 that nearly scuttled its passage in the first place. A group of progressive advocacy groups will announce on Friday a coordinated effort to protect the beneficiaries of the Affordable Care Act and stop Republicans from repealing the law without first identifying a plan to replace it.

They don’t have much time to fight back. Republicans on Capitol Hill plan to set repeal of Obamacare in motion as soon as the new Congress opens in January, and both the House and Senate could vote to wind down the law immediately after President-elect Donald Trump takes the oath of office on the 20th.